Thus it befalls that an Italian machine generally carries a picture of a flower upon its sides. It is characteristic of the race that a French machine usually wears either a valorous, sonorous name or the name of a woman—perhaps the name of the aviator's sweetheart, or that of his mother or his sister possibly. But your average British airman is apt to christen his machine Old Bill or Gaby or Our Little Nipper or The Walloping Window Blind—I have seen all of these cheery titles emblazoned upon splendid big aircraft in a British hangar—and just let it go at that.
I reckon the German, taking his morning hate along with his morning chicory, never will understand how it is the Britisher and the Yankee can make war and make jokes about it and be good sportsmen all at the same time. The German is very sentimental—I myself have heard him with tears in his voice singing his songs of the home place and the Christmas tree and the Rhine maiden as he marched past a burning orphan asylum in Belgium; but his sense of humour, if ever he really owned such a thing, was long ago smothered to death by the poisoned chemical processes of his own military machine. The man who was so bad that he was scared of himself must have been the original exemplar of the frightfulness doctrine. Anyhow he was born in Prussia—I'm sure of that much anyway.
But I am getting away from my subject—have been getting away from it for quite a spell, I fear; because in the first place I started out to tell about a meeting and a trip and a dinner and a song and divers other things. The affair dated from a certain spring noontime when two of us, writers by trade, were temporarily marooned for the day at the press headquarters of the American Expeditionary Force because we couldn't anywhere get hold of an automobile to take us for a scouting jaunt along the American sector. All of a sudden a big biplane came sailing into sight, glittering like a silver flying fish. It landed in a meadow behind the town and two persons, muffled in greatcoats, decanted themselves out of it and tramped across the half-flooded field toward us. When they drew near we perceived them to be two very young, very ruddy gentlemen, and both unmistakably English. My companion, it seemed, knew one of them, so there were introductions.
“What brings you over this way?” inquired my friend.
“Well, you see,” said his acquaintance, “we were a bit thirsty—Bert and I—and we heard you had very good beer at the French officers' club here. So we just ran over for half an hour or so to get a drop of drink and then toddle along back again. Not a bad idea, eh, what?”
The speaker, I noted, wore the twin crowns of a captain on the shoulder straps of his overcoat. His age I should have put at twenty-one or thereabout, and his complexion was the complexion of a very new, very healthy cherub.
We showed the way toward beer and lunch, the latter being table d'hôte but good. En route my confrère was moved to ask more questions.
“Anything new happening at the squadron since I was over that way?” he inquired.
“Quiet enough to be a bore—weather hasn't suited for our sort these last few evenings,” stated the taller one. “We got fed up on doin' nothin' at all, so night before last a squad started across the border to give Fritzie a taste of life. But just after we started the squadron commander decided the weather was too thickish and he signed us back—all but the Young-un, who claims he didn't see the flare and kept on goin' all by his little self.” He favoured us with a tremendous wink.
“It seemed a rotten shame, really it did, to waste the whole evenin'.” This was the Young-un, he of the pink cheeks, speaking. “So I just jogged across the jolly old Rhine until I come to a town, and I dropped my pills there and came back. Nice quiet trip it was—lonely rather, and not a bit excitin'.”